Our Man in Paris , livre ebook

Andrews UK - John Lichfield

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152 pages

English

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Since 1997 John Lichfield, The Independent's correspondent in France, has been sending dispatches back to the newspaper in London. More than transient news stories, the popular 'Our Man in Paris' series consists of essays on all things French. Sometimes serious, at other times light-hearted, they offer varied vignettes of life in the hexagone and trace the author's evolving relationship with his adopted country. Many of Lichfield's themes concern the mysteries of Paris and its people. Who is responsible for the city's extraordinary plumbing? How can you drive around the Arc de Triomphe and survive? He also ponders the phenomena that intrigue many foreigners, such as the eloquence of the capital's beggars and the identity of the intimidating but fast disappearing concierge. Visiting places as different as the Musee d'Orsay and Disneyland, he explores culture high and low as well as the everyday pleasures and problems of living in Paris.

Sujets

Travel writing

France

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	30 mars 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781908493569
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0674€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
OUR MAN IN PARIS
A Foreign Correspondent, France And The French

By
John Lichfield
Signal Books
Oxford

Publisher Information
The publishers gratefully acknowledge The Independent’s kind permission to reproduce and republish the articles in this book
First published in 2010 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford Ox4 1Ly
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and Distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© John Lichfield, 2010
The right of John Lichfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
Design: Bryony Clark Cover illustration: Russ Cook Cartoons: Russ Cook
Printed in India

Dedication

For Margaret, my best source

Introduction
Journalists are seekers of sensation, lovers of the extraordinary. The ordinary is the business of social historians, statisticians, novelists and other bores. Who wants to know about what happened yesterday if it is the same thing that happened last week and last month and last year?
Actually, we all do. Especially if it is the ordinary/extraordinary: not what happens in our own lives, or to our own families, but in the lives of the people next door. Or the country next door.
We British are very nosy about our nearest neighbours; much nosier, it has to be admitted, than they are about us. We especially like to hear of the petty, or not so petty, failures or problems of our cross-Channel cousins.
We have an inferiority-superiority complex about the French. They are unreliable, devious, selfish, rude and oversexed. Their food is over-rated. Château Supercilious is rubbish compared to Koala Creek. They are always on strike / blocking the Channel Tunnel / directing busloads of Afghans to Calais / making incomprehensible movies / giving billions of euros in UK-funded subsidies to greedy, hopeless French farmers.
At the same time, we have an unpleasant suspicion that the French are better looking than we are / have better and more sex / eat better / have better weather / better footballers / a better health service / more open space / higher mountains / more beaches / better schools / better motorways / better railways / better lives.
The French spend less time staring over the Channel than we do. They have other, equally irritating / fascinating neighbours to the north, east and south. They are, in any case, chiefly fascinated by themselves or, à la limite, the Americans. All the same, our schizophrenic suspicions are mirrored by persistent French prejudices, and anxieties, about the British.
We are, seen from across the Channel, emotionally retarded / badly dressed / under America’s thumb / uninterested in food / awkward about sex. We are either frigidly conventional or wildly eccentric or callously violent. We are also, the French fear, more enterprising than they, more innovative and less hung-up by tradition.
The typical British man, according to French stereotypes, either: a) wears a bowler hat; b) has purple hair; c) has a shaven skull and knuckle-dusters. The typical British woman either: a) wears a dull, sensible skirt; b) has purple hair; c) gets drunk before breakfast.
We think of the French as a race of vague, over-emotional, unreliable poets. The French see themselves as a race of rational mathematicians and engineers. We think of ourselves as a race of polite, pragmatic, creative introverts. The French see us as a race of devious, drunken, emotionally-challenged egotists.
My son Charles is an accidental and often unwilling hero of many of the articles in this book. He went through the French education system from six to eighteen. He then went to university in Britain assuming, with a sigh of relief, that he was leaving his parents and going home at the same time. The British students, although friendly, insisted that Charles was irredeemably French. The young Britons appeared equally odd to his French-educated eyes: they are, he says, a generation of “vegetarian alcoholics”.
Our two countries, so close and so historically entwined, live largely back-to-back lives. The Channel is still one of the world’s great cultural fault lines, like a European Rio Grande. And yet we are more interconnected than at any time since the Hundred years War. Over 300,000, mostly young, French people now live in Britain. Over 250,000, mostly middle-aged or older, British people now live full-time in France.
For thirteen years, I have been one of them, as the Paris cor- respondent of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. The articles reprinted here are only a small fraction of the thousands of stories that I have written in that time. In theory, these were the ephemeral articles; the throwaway columns; the soft diaries about my family’s life in France, the chance encounters with odd, or ordinary, French people, both in Paris and in my beloved adopted village in Normandy.
There is little here about high-politics or diplomacy or elections or plane crashes or riots or floods or murders. There is nothing—or very little—on the serial soap operas which have dominated news from France in the last thirteen years: the unfortunate accident of Diana Princess of Wales; the Anglo-French beef war; the insoluble conundrum of the illegal immigrants piling up in Calais; the problems of the multi-racial suburbs; the French stand against the Iraq war; the French “non” to a European constitution; the final years of Chiraquie and the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy.
I wrote many articles about such things. They all seemed hugely important the time. And yet I noticed something strange. The letters or emails that I received from readers were rarely about my (hem hem) hard-hitting, ground-breaking news articles or deeplyconsidered, carefully-crafted opinion articles. Readers responded far more often to a diary column about how my kids were dealing with the French school system; or the casual iniquities of my struggling, hippy-farmer neighbour in Normandy; or my wife’s discovery of a forgotten gallery in the Musée d’Orsay.
In writing about such things, I was often breaking the first rule of news journalism. I was trying to describe the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary. And yet the ordinary and the everyday—if it is someone else’s ordinary—sometimes touch people more than the dramatic and the would-be important. Hence, one assumes, the triumph of the blogosphere. Who cares now about Jacques Chirac’s campaign speeches in 2002? Or the reasons for the French ban on British beef in 1999?
At times I was given a fixed space in the newspaper each week in which to write about whatever amused or interested me. At other times, the columns and diaries had to compete for space with floods, or fires, or wars, or the diaries of other foreign correspondents who were also trying to describe the ordinaryextraordinary in their own countries. Sometimes, I was burning to get something off my chest. More often the blank space and deadline loomed like an appointment with the hangman (or guillotine operator). There are articles here that were written in desperation to fill a space. Others describe events which touched me deeply, like the death in his own small plane of my friend, Bernard, the flying dairy farmer.
Sometimes, I allowed the incidents and characters to speak for themselves. At other times—too often maybe—I felt compelled to generalise and link the events to broader themes or changes in French life. Often, I see, I contradicted myself.
But so what? If these articles are worth rescuing, from the database or the recycling bin, it is because they are snapshots of changing moods and changing times. They do not represent an attempt to “explain France” or to “rubbish France”. They may occasionally stray towards the usual traps of Froglit (a thriving genre in the UK), comic exaggeration or comic romanticisation. But they are not, overall, an attempt to define “the French”, because there is no such people.
There is Parisian France and Provincial France and Southern France and Northern France and Elite France and Grass-roots France and Rural France and Suburban France. There is Old France and there is Young France. All of them appear here, some more than others.
There are running themes such as France’s difficulties with modernity and globalisation; the hypocrisy of Official France towards the slow death of Rural France; the tendency of Political France and Media France to debate, and to attempt to reform, French myths rather than realities. There is much on Parisian rudeness and the many exceptions to it that one finds. There is the contradiction between France’s official devotion to Egalité and Fraternité and the selfish arrogance that is inculcated in the country’s Official Elite (now, I hope, declining).
There is also, I hope, much Savoir-faire and Joie de Vivre.

Part One
Paris
When I first visited Paris, at the age of fourteen with my Belgian godmother, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The buildings were black, just like at home in the north of England. The people were rude. The buses looked like they had been brought out of a museum.
The next time I visited the City of Light, fourte